Well its about that time. My Portfolio Development class has now officially ended, today we had our final class and got to see what everyone has been working on. I somehow managed to finish despite a couple setbacks and laziness (and I got an A if anyones keeping track). Now that the class is done for this semester (going back for round 2 in fall), I wanted to start sharing my final 10 with you guys.
But first, a little background about this project.
I originally came up with this idea when I was around 19 or so and started taking a lot of local road trips. I had discovered how much I liked going for drives and loved exploring rural areas like the Delta or the country in areas like Wilton or Jackson, and even wine country. One thing I happened to always notice was the alarmingly high amount of roadside memorials I would see along the way. I distinctly remember one trip through the wine country and counting the amount of roadside markers I saw. It was chilling. But it sparked a curiosity in me. Why do families do these? I wonder how they get it there? How long have some of these been around? Why did that person die? These are questions I’m still asking and trying to find answers to with this project. Back then I decided that I would like to someday create a book with all these roadside markers telling their story.
Well this phase of my project is just scratching the surface of that curiosity and story. For this Portfolio Development class I decided to shoot 10 photos from these roadside memorials, along one of my favorite places to drive, Highway 160 along the Sacramento River, known also as River Road. Obtaining the information behind each memorial has proven to be more difficult than I had originally thought but this summer I’m dedicating myself to investigating these thoroughly, I feel like I owe it to these people to tell their story and hopefully make people painfully aware about being safer on these dangerous rural roads.
I’ll be posting each roadside memorial in a 5 part series for the next few Wednesdays and sharing some of the information I’ve learned along the way. I definitely hope you can take something away from it as I have.
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[…] doing some initial research for this project I came across some statistics. In 2010 32,885 lives were claimed by roads. This is unfortunately […]
Good job on the A & great post … very interesting that you were able to ask all those questions, even if you don’t get answers. I don’t think most people think that deep. Very well written.